The Official Rackspace Blog » Ziad Sawalhahttp://www.rackspace.com/blog
The Official Rackspace BlogTue, 03 Mar 2015 17:16:10 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.0.1Social Automation, Blueprints And Deployment Serviceshttp://www.rackspace.com/blog/social-automation-blueprints-and-deployment-services/
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/social-automation-blueprints-and-deployment-services/#commentsTue, 17 Sep 2013 21:00:21 +0000http://www.rackspace.com/blog/?p=32711Our philosophy of “social automation” led to a desire for anyone to be able to contribute to the automation scripts and blueprints used by the Deployment Services. We have been able to take our Rackers’ knowledge and best practices around applications and frameworks and store that in code that can deploy a full-fledged configuration. Additionally, if something unexpected occurs while the automation is running, which causes a failure in the process, we want to allow a person to intervene, pause the automation engine and manually take over. Find out more in this video below.

]]>http://www.rackspace.com/blog/social-automation-blueprints-and-deployment-services/feed/0Deployment Services Was Made For Developershttp://www.rackspace.com/blog/deployment-services-was-made-for-developers/
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/deployment-services-was-made-for-developers/#commentsTue, 10 Sep 2013 21:00:17 +0000http://www.rackspace.com/blog/?p=32706Developers know the importance of having separate environments for development, staging and production, but they also know that it is a pain to set them up. Furthermore, it is hard to guarantee the consistency in each of these environments; when code fails in production you may hear, “But it worked in staging!” only to realize that the two environments were not identical. Rackspace Deployment Services aims to solve this issue by providing a simple, repeatable and automatic way to set up cloud environments for applications and frameworks. Find out more in this video below.

]]>http://www.rackspace.com/blog/deployment-services-was-made-for-developers/feed/0Using Deployment Services At Rackspace To Quickly Create Cloud Configurationshttp://www.rackspace.com/blog/using-deployment-services-at-rackspace-to-quickly-create-cloud-configurations/
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/using-deployment-services-at-rackspace-to-quickly-create-cloud-configurations/#commentsTue, 03 Sep 2013 21:00:50 +0000http://www.rackspace.com/blog/?p=32693With the arrival of Deployments in the Control Panel, you now have the ability to easily deploy applications and frameworks to the cloud. This allows developers to focus on their code instead of spending time architecting and setting up their production, test, or development environments. But people want to know, is this service ready for prime time?

Absolutely. In fact, we have been using Deployment Services inside Rackspace for several months now. This solution has enabled our teams to rapidly produce tried-and-true environments for customers to handle high production loads. Learn more about how Rackspace has used Deployment Services internally, including how our Managed Cloud team was able to get a robust customer configuration up in three hours to handle an incredible amount of traffic from Shark Tank, in this video below.

Last week OpenStack announced the release of the latest version of OpenStack, Diablo (see here how we name releases). As a founder of OpenStack, Rackspace is excited to see the fourth release of the community driven software become a reality. In just over a year the OpenStack community has grown phenomenally and now is supported by over 110 companies!

As an active member of the OpenStack community and the technical lead (PTL) of Keystone, I am thrilled at the rapid progress OpenStack is making and super excited for the future of OpenStack. The Diablo code release includes nearly 70 new features and enhancements making it possible for a broader community of users to deploy OpenStack clouds in production on a global scale. OpenStack Diablo improves the existing core projects: OpenStack Compute (code name Nova), OpenStack Object storage (code name Swift) and OpenStack Image Service (code name Glance). In addition to those, new projects are in the OpenStack Incubator program and two of those have been accepted into core for Essex, the next release; OpenStack Dashboard and OpenStack Identity (code name Keystone).

Keystone is one of OpenStack’s newest projects. Our goal with Keystone is to allow people to download, install, and run OpenStack intheir environments using their own, local usernames and passwords. We want that experience to be easy and seamless. And soon the Rackspace Cloud will be supporting the Keystone API.

As a big supporter of OpenStack, Rackspace has hundreds of developers incorporating OpenStack into Rackspace products. In the future all of our cloud products will be operating on OpenStack. Overall we want to make a cloud operating system that allows people to have a choice of providers for their data and configurations and be able to freely move from provider to provider.

Rackspace has been running OpenStack Object Storage in production since the announcement of OpenStack last year. The OpenStack Compute Alpha is in full swing. Rackspace began testing OpenStack Compute in our data centers this summer and is looking forward to the beta soon. Every month we make big strides in making an open cloud environment for our 150,000 customers. The Diablo release is another milestone reached and will make OpenStack that much stronger as we continue to incorporate and deliver Rackspace products deployed on OpenStack.